Lead Image © Leo Blanchette, 123RF.com

Lead Image © Leo Blanchette, 123RF.com

Solving the security problems of encrypted DNS

Double-Edged Sword

Article from ADMIN 56/2020
By
DNS encryption offers WiFi users good protection in public spaces; however, in the enterprise, it prevents the evaluation and filtering of name resolution.

Dynamic Name Service (DNS) is a fundamental Internet service. As soon as you enter a computer name (e.g., www.mozilla.org ), DNS finds the corresponding IP address, 63.245.208.195 in this case. Without DNS you would have to know IP addresses by heart and enter them directly in your web browser's address bar.

The DNS data packets pass through the network without encryption or signatures. Only a 16-bit random number, intended to ensure the assignment of the request and response, provides rudimentary protection. The requesting client accepts the first incoming response with the correct random number and stores it temporarily in its cache. An attacker need only respond faster than the official DNS server to redirect the request. Inserting fake DNS entries in the cache is known as DNS cache poisoning.

Because all DNS traffic is unencrypted, it can be monitored and evaluated – by the provider or by your employer, among others. If an admin is looking to block undesirable access to servers that distribute malware in this way, unencrypted DNS can be advantageous.

About DNS Security

DNSSEC [1] is an established, but still not sufficiently widespread, standard for generating signed and therefore verifiable DNS responses. Providers and organizations that use at least this standard to thwart attacks, such as DNS spoofing and DNS cache poisoning, would be very desirable. At the moment, however, an overriding concern seems to be that using it makes DNS even more prone to error. Many large enterprises therefore still currently do without DNSSEC.

DNSSEC does not encrypt the content data (confidentiality) and only signs the data (integrity). Essentially, two keys are required per domain: one to sign the domain data (marked with code 256; typically 1024 bits) and a second to sign the keys (code 257; typically 2048 bits). The keys

...
Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).

Buy this article as PDF

Express-Checkout as PDF
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy ADMIN Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
 
SUBSCRIPTIONS
 
TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS
Get it on Google Play

US / Canada

Get it on Google Play

UK / Australia

Related content

comments powered by Disqus